Taproot

Empty Chairs at Empty Tables

I'm not a big fan of musicals (excluding "Sound of Music", "My Fair Lady", "Mary Poppins" or any of the other musicals I grew up watching with my mom).  As an actor, I avoided acting in them.  My one turn in one was as Judas/John in Godspell.  I hated the choreography so much that I decided it was my "character" to screw up every number.  After that, I was done with them.  However, I did go through a phase where I liked the music in Andrew Lloyd Weber's plays.  Don't judge, I was young and ignorant.

In any case, there was one song from "Les Miserables" that really hit me in my clinically depressed, teenage angst sweet spot.  Towards the end, Marius is bemoaning the death of all of his revolutionary friends, which in true ALW fashion, he does with the over the top melodramatic "Empty Chairs at Empty Tables".  The last lines of that song always made me a little emotional (you can judge a little on that one, but again, I was young, ignorant AND clinically depressed, so cut me a little slack).

Marius sings:

Oh my friends, my friends, don't ask me

What your sacrifice was for

Empty chairs at empty tables

Where my friends will sing no more

I have no idea what it was about those lines that got me.  I was a "cool" kid with plenty of friends and they were most certainly not "dead and gone".  Yet, for some reason, something about the loneliness in the song resonated in a deep place.

Years later, I was again at the center of a cool kid crowd.  Most every night, Sharon and I were hanging out with people we called friends, laughing, drinking, eating family style meals.  We wondered how we had ever had fun without these people.  We told ourselves we were lucky to have such great people around us.  We thought we would all be friends forever.  We were lying to ourselves.  Overnight, it seemed (though in truth it had probably been a long time coming), it all imploded, becoming a blackhole that swallowed everything: the group dinners; the game nights; the laugh-filled nights.  Before it devoured itself, that dying star almost took our marriage, as well.

Though I will always be sorry for the way it came to pass, there is no question the outcome was the best thing that could've happened.  We had chosen our friends badly, and now they had been blown away like so much chaff.

So it is, that today I found myself in the backyard looking at empty chairs, thinking about "Les Miz" and Marius' cheesy song.  Not because I was lonely and missing those people, but because I was glad that they weren't around to screw all of this peace up.   I like the fact that, for the most part, no one sits in these chairs but Sharon and I.  In my life, there has been noise and fun and revelrie.  But there have been very few true friends.  I love these empty chairs, because it seems to me like they're reserved for a VIP crowd of two.  A place to have a cup of coffee or an afternoon beer.  A spot to watch the last bit of light ebb from the day.

These empty chairs have seen a lot of the good life, without having to deal with a lot of the bullshit that often keeps the good life at bay.

None of this is to say I don't have any more friends.  Throughout the last couple years, I have managed to keep a couple.  Managed to make a couple more.  I think Sharon and I would both welcome new friends to fill our chairs.  They just have to be the right ones.  They have to understand what this place means, and respect how hard we have worked to make it look like this...feel like this.

We must both be feeling optimistic about how many of those new friends are out there...because we just bought a BIG ASS TABLE!!!

   

OWAID?

A while back, WWJD made the rounds as a new Christian fad.  An acronym for "What Would Jesus Do?", it found its way onto t-shirts, bracelets and other sundry chochkies.  Though the question itself is a valid one, I dismissed it as just another annoying way we out ourselves as hypocrites, placing people who sported WWJD kitsch in the same category as people who flip me off on the I405 as they drive by with their Christian fish decal.  Personally, I try to keep my road rage options open by limiting my Jesus bling to a small cross hanging from my rearview mirror.

Still, the WWJD craze served to solidify the growing stature of catchy acronyms in our English language.  I take some responsibility for that tragedy, since I work in an industry that has made text messaging ubiquitous, and acronyms are an easy end around character limits.  However, my Stanford siblings will tell you that acronyms had infiltrated the bastions of slightly higher learning before cell phones ever found their way into the hands of pre-adolescents.  Truth be told, though we blame acronym-mania on the deterioration of our educational standards, those of us who have made education a priority shoulder much of the blame, calling our best museums MoMA and LACMA, while lazily referring to our country's highest positions as POTUS and SCOTUS.  At Yale, for instance, we took derisive pleasure in calling the Department of University Health, DUH, long after the school tried to correct the implications by renaming it the Yale University Department of Health. 

Given the intellectual roots of my acronym fetish, it should come as some surprise that my current acronym of choice did not come from snooty linguistic laziness, but from a toddler.  As my niece came into her own as a Tittle Talker, she developed the amusing habit of prefacing all her questions with "Oh".  My favorite exchanges would go something like this:

Katie:  Oh, what are you doing?

Me:  I'm sitting in the car.

Katie:  Oh, what am I doing?

Me:  You're sitting in the car, too.

Katie:  Oh, am I sitting in the car, too?

Me:  Yes.

While she has since grown out of that phase, the habit has stuck with Sharon and I...call it a fair punishment for all the times I've tried to teach her to say things that were, shall we say, off color.  In any case, her verbal stylings have become a regular staple of the way Sharon and I communicate and, since we text each other a lot, the phrases have been shortened to OWAYD, OWAID, etc.

As the title of this post suggests, it is OWAID that has been on my mind lately.  As, I'm sure, was the original intent behind WWJD, it is a question that can be asked of any situation, at any time of the day.  But lately, it has become a life question:  OWAID?

I have been blessed with a great many things in my life.  A loving family.  Healthy (mostly) relationships.  A good job.  A nice house.  A huge yard, increasingly filled with beautiful living things.  A tremendous amount of ability and talent.  And yet, here I sit, unfulfilled.  OWAID?  Oh, where am I going?  The brutal truth of it is this is not where I expected to be at 33, buckling beneath the weight of my pedigree and expectations.  I am not unhappy, but I know there's more to everything than this.  I can't have been given so much to accomplish so little.

Oh, what is the point?

I don't know.  As I said, I am not unhappy.  In fact, in many ways, I am happier and healthier than ever.  My life is good!  Perhaps, what I am experiencing is divine discomfort.  Maybe, just maybe, what I experience as OWAID, is God asking me OWAYD, nudging me forward to the next step.  If God were to speak in pop music lyrics, perhaps He'd be saying "You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here."

Great.  OWTHDIDN? 

  

Weed

If you're a gardener, you know the fight against weeds never ends.  They show up everywhere you don't want them.  They're impossible to eradicate.  They choke the life out of plants you're working to protect.  To put it bluntly, they are the enemy.

But, every now and then, I see them in a different light.  They are remarkable organisms, masters of innovation and proliferation, the ultimate survival experts.  For all the care and attention that goes into maintaining "good" plants (which in some instances, are simply weeds we like), weeds grow and thrive entirely on their own, sometimes in the face of repeated assaults on their existence.  They take their circumstances, such as they are, and make do.

The other day, as I walked out to my car, licking the wounds inflicted upon me by my 9 to 5, I saw this guy next to my truck.   Maybe it was the fading light,  maybe it was my frame of mind, but I found him incredibly beautiful.  As I knelt down to look at him, I heard no complaints, no lament for the lot he'd been given.  He was just growing where he'd been dropped, seemingly enjoying what little sunshine he could in the time he had.

I would like to be like him, to find room to grow in whatever crevice I am wedged in.  To bask in the sunshine and dare the world to rip me out, knowing full well it might take me up on my challenge.  I am increasingly surrounded by asphalt, but I am humbled that a weed can still show me what it takes to make it through this.  A little space, a little creativity and precious little time.  If I use what little I may feel I have, maybe I, too, can make someone stop in their tracks, take a closer look and have them think I'm beautiful.

This is not about irises...

Last November, Sharon and I spent an entire day digging out a bed of fifty year old irises.  Planted long ago by the mother of our house's previous owner, they had lived the last few years in obscurity, a mangled mess of ratty grey leaves in a patch of dirt next to where we keep our trash cans.  They flowered occasionally, but we never really took notice of them.  Then, at the suggestion of one Sharon's gardening books, we decided to dig them up and split them.  Apparently, irises like that.   Plus, the fall and impending winter had us jonesing for a garden project.  So, we figured "what the heck" and set to work.  Before we knew it, we had over a hundred iris tubers.  After amending the soil in their original location and replanting as many as we could fit there, we still had a bucket full of them.  Not wanting them to go to waste, we did what any self respecting gardener would do.  We planted them everywhere.

Over the past few months, they have all grown dramatically.  Still, having never replanted irises before, we really had no idea if we should expect them to bloom.  Then, a few weeks ago, we noticed one of them sending up a flower bud.  As we'd done with my first sunflower, we went into flower watch mode, checking daily to see if today was the day we would see the rebirth of someone's forgotten treasure.  A couple of weeks ago, right around Easter, our vigil was rewarded.    A beautiful yellow bearded iris.

I was ecstatic!  I spent a while trying to get a great picture, with the expectation that it would be the centerpiece of a post on transplants...an opportunity to talk about how sometimes uprooting things makes them grow stronger, more beautiful...about how being transplanted is the story of my life, and the lives of the people I love most.  Maybe I'd use it to start talking a bit about my mother, the epitome of a transplant herself, whose middle name is Iris.  It was going to be brilliant!

And then an awful thing happened.  I sat down to write this metaphorical masterpiece and nothing happened.  Inspiration gone.  Maybe I just needed to mull it over a bit, give it some time.  So I waited a couple days and tried again. Still nothing.  Worse than nothing -- total and utter mediocre garbage.  Not even a good first draft.

But I was committed to the fact that this elusive expository gem would be my next post, so I waited some more.  And then a little more after that.  Every day added to the pressure to write something spectacular.  After all, if I'd waited this long, it would be shame to settle for anything less. 

Today I realized that, as I've pondered my perennial muse, waiting for a thought that might never find its way into words, countless other inspirations have passed me by.  There are bloomin' iriseseverywhere.  The salvia has exploded into whites, purples, pinks and reds.  Canna is once again poking out of the ground and yesterday, the first rose bloomed by the back porch.  There are thousands of beautiful things left unsaid, un-thought.

How often must I learn these lessons?  That as I wait for the right way to say what I want to say, I miss the opportunity to say the things I should say?  That as I gaze out at the horizon for the ship I dream of to come in, a hundred ships bound for dreams unknown have left the dock?

A few months ago, struggling with her own darkness, Sharon asked me what the point of life was.  In a moment of rare wisdom, I answered:  To live it.  We all have hopes and dreams.  They are, in some ways, necessary evils, mile markers we see in the distance that allow us to lie to ourselves and say that, when we get there, we will stop running.  We will rest.  We will be done.  In more ways than one, I have been sleepwalking, chasing lofty goals and aspirations.  But if I am to truly live life, sometimes even the dreaming of the dream must be deferred.  Otherwise, I will continue to wake and find I have traveled a distance I cannot remember.

So my blog on transplants will have to wait for another day...or perhaps another life...because there is still light in this day.  More than enough time to pour myself a wee whiskey, sit in the garden and catch up with the things I've missed.

An Invitation to the Banquet -- My Own Take

**Note: my father is writing/has written (?) a book by the same name, so I think it's important to point out I am borrowing his title and the views expressed are solely my own...though it is the nature of fathers to heavily influence the views of their sons, and therefore my views are probably his fault. :) **

When my siblings and I were kids, my father used to tell us that grades were the least important indicator of knowledge. 

The best way to judge how much someone knows, he'd say, is to listen to the questions they ask. 

I think we all took this as a personal challenge to ask as many questions as possible...one of the first ones being: "Does this mean our parents don't care if we get bad grades?"  That question, it turns out, is a good indicator that you don't know shit. 

I personally made "questioning" my mode of choice, particularly when it applied to authority.  And, I quickly learned that nowhere was there more authority worth questioning than in the Church.  It's important to point out that I have always been, and will always be of Christian faith.  I have a home church.  I believe in Jesus the Christ and God in Heaven.  More importantly, I believe in the principles of acceptance, forgiveness and redemption that are at the core of my faith.  But it is a far cry from professing that faith, to defending the wholesale ignorance of most people who go to Church.  Ignorance, mind you, not stupidity.  Ignorance demonstrated not by them getting a failing grade in their Jesus Test, but in their steadfast insistence on checking their real questions at the door.

That's right, I said "real questions".  That's because most churches (Protestant ones, anyway) I've been associated with will tell you they want you to ask questions.  But what I learned early on was that there was a list of "acceptable" questions, the ones the Church felt they had a good response to.  And then there were the tough ones, the ones I started asking silently in Sunday school.   The ones that went something like this:

Does anyone else think that Samson guy was a total dick?  And why do we think it's awesome that he killed all those unsuspecting diners?

Why are the disciples the stupidest people in the Bible?  And what does that say about the fact we call ourselves "disciples"?

Why doesn't anyone read the parts of the Psalms where David dashes the baby brains on the rocks?

Am I the only one who things the statement, "I only slept with my daughter because I was trashed and she came on to me" should disqualify you as a Biblical hero?

And, just for good measure, I'll throw in one to get my dad a little worked up:

Was there anyone in the Bible MORE arrogant than Paul?  I mean who says, "we are all sinners...but I'm pretty sure I was the BIGGEST sinner.  Like, if we're judging based on sin, then I was the BEST sinner...EVER"?

They may sound trite, but these are not silly questions.  These are questions that everyone who hasn't taken the "shepherd and sheep" analogy to mean that we should literally act like sheep, should be asking.  And, I would venture to say, questions like these would probably lead us around to discussing things that might get us a little closer to the truth of the matter:  We need to get a little more comfortable with not knowing what the hell we're talking about.  We claim a God who is bigger than us.  Smarter than us.  Beyond us.  That means God is more than the bite sized pieces that even the smartest among us (I'm talking to you, Paul!) can absorb, much less regurgitate in a doctrinal thesis or spew on a family values talk radio show.  And guess what?  I like that about God.  It means some of the questions I can't answer, I don't have to.  That's why God is God, and I'm just me.

I've been dealing with one of those questions for a week now.  As you may know, we have some plum trees next to our back porch.  Over the past couple years, one of them has given exactly one fruit per season.  So, this year, in an effort to encourage cross pollination, I put bird feeders in each of them.  The thought was, if I could get birds to fly back and forth between the trees while they were flowering, I might see a little more fruit.  Basically, I gave God a shot for a couple years, but this year we're gonna try it my way.  Typical of me, by the way.  The results of my meddling are yet to be proven, but one thing is already abundantly clear:

There's nothing like a banquet buffet to bring out the riff raff.

 Don't laugh.  This is a Biblical concept.  But before I get to that, let me tell you what I'm talking about.  You see, the birds LOVE the feeders.  I took this picture this morning after having filled this feeder to the top yesterday morning...we got us some birds eating out of that thing!  In fact, since I put them up, it's like I have a birdie Vegas buffet right outside the sliding glass doors.  I truly didn't know some of the birds we're seeing lived in our neighborhood:  Blue jays, robins, flycatchers.  I like to think of them as the chic tourists, the Hollywood day trippers, the European faux-hawk crowd.  And, of course, we also have the midwestern crowd, the out-sized mourning doves that literally sit beneath the feeders all day long stuffing their faces.  I can almost hear them saying, We made the trip, now we're gonna get our money's worth.  I don't mind  any of them.  I love watching them.  After all, that's who the feeders are for. 

Then there's the riff raff.  Squirrels, refusing to acknowledge I have purchased the "squirrel proof" feeders, make daily attempts to make me feel like I wasted my money by not having gotten the pretty ones.  Full disclosure:  I don't really mind squirrels, either.  They're greedy little bastards, but there's something endearing about them.  Okay fine, they can eat, too, as long as they don't keep pulling the lids off and pulling seed out from the top.

But they aren't the only riff-raff.  The other day, just as I let one of my dogs out, a hawk flashed into one of the plum trees about 10 feet from me.  Now, I love hawks.  They are my favorite bird, and I have a large tattoo of one on my back.  But, I don't want one as a pet.  And having one death dive into a tree and land 4 feet above my dog's head is a completely different story.  Thankfully, realizing last minute that the dog below was of the 70 pound variety, it flew off to sit on a nearby telephone wire for a few minutes.  It was breathtaking in not an entirely bad way, and I like to think it was there for the squirrels and not lying in wait for Einstein, my 7 pound toy poodle.  Regardless, this banquet of mine was attracting predators.

It was the tree rats that put me over the edge.  Everything else has some kind of redeeming quality.  Beauty. Predatory grace.  Just plain cute.  But when you walk out just after dark, see several rats running through your trees and hear them clambering over the porch awning, something happens inside.  It's that oh, HELL no! moment when you say I'll be damned if I'm going to feed a family of freakin' rats!  So, over the past week, I've been putting out poison for them every night.  In case you're wondering, poisoning rats works just like poisoning people at a buffet: you put out something that looks nothing like food, but apparently tastes damn good, and they ingest mass quantities of it before going back to lay in their room in agony, wishing for death.

I did it without remorse, even watching to make sure they were coming to eat it.  I did it with complete discrimination, as well.  I put it out at night, when I was sure the squirrels were gone and after my dogs had been out for the last time.  And, I brought any leftovers back in at the beginning of the next day so the rest of the wildlife wouldn't accidentally eat it.  I didn't want to hurt anything else.  I only wanted the rats gone.  They ate ridiculous amounts of the stuff, and every night I had to deal with seeing them swarming through the trees, all the while wishing them dead.  Then, on Thursday, they were gone.  We didn't see them that night and, the next day, the poison was still there.  Mission accomplished.

Perhaps it's because it's Easter.  Maybe it's because my "honey-do" list today includes getting up on my roof and in the attic to find out if the rats decided to die on my property.  I don't know.  What I do know is this whole thing has me feeling pensive.  I have questions I can't answer...that probably no one can answer.

You see, the Bible recounts one of Jesus' parables, where a king sets out a marriage feast and invites all the best people to come.  For whatever reason, the cool kids think it's a big joke and decide not to show.  So the king says to his servants, "Hey I've got a feast here.  Find me someone to eat it."  And the servants go and grab every Tom, Dick and Sally from the streets and fill the hall and have a much better party than they probably would have if the original folks had showed up.  The way this story has been explained to me, is that God is the king opening his banquet to all the riff-raff through forgiveness.  But something isn't quite right for me.  Never mind that the king kicks one of them out for not being dressed properly, what bothers me about this story is the tough question behind it that no one asks: 

What if the first people the king invited had showed up?  Would that mean the others would have been persona non grata?

I look at my bird feeders and I desperately hope God is more forgiving than me.  Because all my preferred guests showed up...so I made it difficult for everyone else.  I bought feeders that made it harder for squirrels to share the bounty.  I kept a suspicious eye on the hawk from afar, ready to rush out and scare it away if it got too close again.  And I poisoned the rats.

Heck, while I'm at it, I hope God is more forgiving than the Church.  We talk a big game about having an open table, but we act like all the preferred guests are already sitting at their seats, and we treat the riff raff like pests.  Predators.  Rats.

For good measure, I pray God is bigger than the Bible, too.  I pray God had a plan for feeding everyone who was hungry, whether the A-List showed up or not.  I pray that the Word of God, the one that leaves me with so many concerns, isn't the only word God has.  I have too many questions left unanswered and I have a feeling I'm not the only rat tired of eating poison.

 

Lady (Bug) Luck

My roses are getting ready to bloom.  That means daily visits to the garden to look at the dark red foliage and count the buds...and the return of the never ending battle with aphids.  This weekend, Sharon and I decided to ratchet up the conflict by bringing in some reinforcements.  Lady Bugs.

If you didn't already know, those pretty little bugs are supposed to be the Red Horsemen to aphids.  They slay.  They maim.  They take no prisoners.  They are ruthless killers, polka-dotted predators wreaking destruction in the soft-bodied bug world.

So we bought a few at the nursery.  About 1500 of them give or take.  They came in a little cardboard container with a mesh top, and as we took them home you could see them massing at the edge of the battlefield, little legs churning.  I could almost hear the little Mel Gibson lady bug flying up and down the ranks, riling them up in a frenzy of blood lust.

But the moment was'nae right.  Nae, fer utmost carnage ye must wait fer dusk.  (That last bit was in a Scottish accent.)

And we waited.  We stared across the killing fields.   The aphids cowered in anticipation of the death that was surely coming to them until, in the waning moments of the day, the savage lady bugs could finally be released.

It was time.  We opened the container and our mercenaries came rushing to join the fray.  I had a moment when, hands covered in red armored warriors, I thought:  My luck is about to change!  After all, one lady bug on your shoulder is a harbinger of good things and I was covered in them.  We placed a few strategically, flanking the awful aphids, but ultimately we just ended up scattering them near the most important locations.  Then we went inside and let them go at it.  That night, I dreamed of victory and, in the morning, I ran out to see what we had wrought.

The aphids were all still there and there wasn't a lady bug in sight.  Maybe the wind blew them away, Sharon speculated, a theory debunked by the lone lady bug who rode my windshield at 45 miles per hour almost all the way home from church.  Lady Bug Luck, it appears, is a fickle fighter and, apparently, my aphids just weren't worth the effort. 

There are times when Fate, having done an otherwise bang-up job of making me feel star-crossed, tips his hand and lets me know he's just screwing with me for the hell of it.  At those moments, I realize I am not driving, that the jolts and turns have nothing to do with me.  This is just the ride I'm on and it will be over soon.  So when the bottom drops out, the best thing to do is put my hands up in the air, scream like an 8 year old and collect my silly picture on my way to the next thrill...

This morning, I awoke to a Monday melee of bad news e-mails.  But I am happy.  Luck is what you make it.  If it refuses to sit on your shoulder, you go out and get some more.  And if that doesn't work, you yell into the wind at your face, try not to pee your pants and hope the camera doesn't catch you looking stupid.

Life is a roller coaster, after all, designed to freak you out a little and get your adrenaline pumping.  If it doesn't, what's the point in riding?  Bring it, Fate.  I'm loving it.

Some days...

I have made my life's work a habit of writing things in random places and forgetting about it.  Some of my most important thoughts have been memorialized on scraps of paper, countless unfilled notebooks and flash drives.  While a scattershot approach to developing a body of literature, it occasionally has the benefit of providing me with moments of retrospect at unexpected, yet entirely appropriate, moments.  At such moments, I often find messages of hope in bottles set adrift from the distant shores of my past.  Today, in desperate need of a missive of forgotten wisdom, I found this:

Some days we find beautiful The way the wind swirls scattered paper, The way the sun sits precisely so on a fencepost. Some days we find ways to find beautiful The happy family behind the screaming child, The blessings set in silhouette by sadness. Some days beautiful finds us Sitting so close, hanging words on every second We have left. On days like these, Beautiful happens On us without warning or fanfare And we are unaware there is more to it than us, That we are not alone together, That there is weather and wind and sadness. Some days, on days just like this, We exist within, without and beyond What could have been Beautiful.

A poem from another time, posted with others on the tritest of websites, but relevant nonetheless.  It reminds me I am thankful for the moments in the past week when, despite my struggles, Beautiful has happened upon me sitting in a dark place.  Loving gestures from my wife.  Affectionate words from friends.  More importantly, it reminds me I have said things that have mattered...that still matter, even when taken in a different context.  I have done many things badly, but I take comfort in this one thing:  that I have always been good at finding beauty in the damnedest places.

So it is I find myself, recommitted to finding Beautiful again.  Soon.  Perhaps now.

Macro

During my senior year in high school, I had the pleasure of studying with one of my favorite teachers: Mr. Blek.  He taught AP History and AP Economics, and was immensely popular, mainly due to the fact he swore in class and was the PA announcer at football games.  But I liked him because he was the first teacher I ever had who didn't seem to view my intelligence as a threat to his existence.

I know you're smarter than me, Tittle.  But if you're gonna pass this class, you still need to learn the shit I know.

And I did.  I learned to love History as a living breathing organism, not a series of dots on a linear chart.  That love served me well during my bright college years, blossoming into a full-blown romance in the hallowed ivy halls of university.  But when Mr. Blek called me out, he wasn't taking me to task over history.  He was talking about his passion.  Economics.  A subject that, for any number of reasons, I was not pre-disposed to understand.  Yet, under his animated, and sometimes vulgar, tutelage, I learned to love that subject, too.  More of a fleeting affair, really, but it lasted long enough to pass the Micro Economics AP test with the highest marks.  A five.  I fell a little short on the Macro Economics test, coming in with a three...good enough to pass, but not good enough to brag about.

You see, Macro is about the big picture, about how markets intertwine and about how economies rise and fall.  To me, it seemed too impersonal, distant.  Macro involved to much objectivity for the opinionated brain of a gifted 17 year old.  Nope.  Micro was more my speed.  Down and dirty, in the trenches.  Just the way I like it.

It should come as no surprise then, that I now make my living traversing the treacherous straits of micro-economies in Los Angeles.  I am well-versed in the dreams and fears that businesses have.  On a daily basis, I use terms like "soft costs", "bottom line" and "diminishing marginal returns".  Mr. Blek would be proud.  I learned the shit he taught pretty well.

I am getting better at Macro, too.  But these days, it means something different.  The Macro I'm learning is not about gazing at things from a high level.  It is about getting very close, holding a camera very still and trying to catch a fleeting flash of flower looking spectacular.  It my not be what Mr. Blek had in mind, but one thing hasn't changed.  Every now and then, I capture an image that sends me a message I have heard before and will probably hear again:

You're pretty smart, Tittle.  But you still don't know shit.

Shock

A couple weeks ago, Sharon and I concluded our ongoing debate about what to plant along the wall next to the entry to our yard.  During our weekly trip to Lowes (We're cool like that.  Get over it.), I caught a whiff of a scent I'd forgotten.  Chasing some far off childhood memory, I ended up in front of a stand of jasmine in bloom.  Truth be told, if asked to name the scent, I would never been able to place it.  But standing in front of those 5 gallon containers, it all came rushing back to me...pink and white flowered bushes sprawling over fences.  Perfume hanging heavy in the hot desert air. 

Hello, jasmine.  Haven't we met? 

I shared a private moment with them.  Funny, I'm sure they were there for many of the bad times in my childhood, but none of those came to me.  Instead, they were the backdrop to a thousand summer bike rides; a screen behind which to hide from seekers, or to steal a kiss.  Jasmine.  Smell of boyhood summers.

So good to see you again.

Snapping out of it, I had a brief conference with Sharon.  She had her own jasmine memories and, before I knew it, there were five bushes in the back of the FJ Cruiser.  A couple hours later, they were looking beautiful in their brand new spot by the wall.

 All was well...at least for a few days.  Until the beautiful flowers suddenly started looking like this:

For a moment, we worried they were dying.  But, upon closer inspection, it was clear they had gone into shock.  Before gardening, I had never thought "shock" applied to plants.  However, a year and a half into my life as a gardener, I have learned differently.  All too often, those lovely, happy plants at the nursery react badly to being put in the ground.  Traumatized by the change in environment, they droop.  They wilt.  Sometimes, they seem to have died.  Sometimes, you can fix this by giving them lots of attention.  More times than not, you just have to trust they'll get over it and leave them alone.  Usually, they pull it together and get back to doing what they do.  Grow.

I can relate.  This is the state I go into almost every Monday.  Ripped from the beauty and happiness of my weekend, I find myself thrown into an environment I feel I have no choice but to accept.  I become listless.  I slouch.  Some days, like today, I feel as if I might die from the shock to the system.  I do not need more water.  I just need to be left alone, so I can adjust and get back to doing what I do.  But unlike a transplanted shrub, I don't need to be there forever.  There is home to return to and, when I get there, enough light left in the day to go out to the garden and let the day seep out of my system.  Some wine.  Some cheese.  A hug and a kiss beneath the myrtle.

The day has worn on me but, if I'm lucky, someday I'll catch a whiff of jasmine and the only thing I'll remember is how wonderful it feels to come home.

Life in Context

Everywhere I look there is Spring.  After an abnormally cold and rainy winter, the weather has finally settled into the sunshiney 80s and the world around me is responding with a burst of new growth.  In the garden, there are flowers that weren't there two weeks ago and there are tomato seedlings sprouting in little pots on my dining table.  Tis the season of promise and new beginnings.

Yesterday I came home early.  I was feeling sick and needed to rest.  But, before I crawled into bed and shut down, I took a walk through the garden and had a good look around.  Shrubs and perennials, planted in uncertainty and expectation, were making it clear they are here for the long haul.  Annuals, determined to make the most of their limited time, were blooming furiously and there were birds working on nests in the trees overhead.  There is a dizzying variety of color and song, yet they are unified in their message:  Life is coming.  Life is here.

They are unified in one other thing, as well.  Not a single plant or creature out there has any idea of the role they have played in the rejuvenation of my life and marriage.  Even if those plants were sentient, there is no way they could know the simple fact of their existence would provide the hope Sharon and I needed to get through the winter of our discontent and see this Spring together.

I am struck by the thought that, in many respects, we are all similarly ignorant of our importance to the bigger picture.  We live because it is our instinct to do so, rarely realizing the impact this function of biology has on the world around us.  Life is just what we do.  Yet, if we are ever lucky enough to be gifted with greater perception, we might realize there are people to whom our survival matters.  In the damp and despair of darkness, they hope for our happiness.  And, when it blooms, their lives are better for it.

Today, my father and younger brother celebrate their birthdays.  When taken in context, I'm sure the significance of the event is different for each of their lives.  But for me, it is a chance to take pleasure and joy in the role they have played in mine.

Daddy and Daniel, my life and the lives of others are better because yours continue.  I love you both.  Happy Birthday.